Opinion Contributor

Man down in Massachusetts

It’s over; we lost the special election in Massachusetts to replace Secretary of State John Kerry by a score of roughly 55 percent to 45 percent. What’s that? You didn’t know there was one? Oops. That’s the problem.

Let’s be clear, this was a winnable race. The Democrat candidate, Congressman Ed Markey, ran a lackluster campaign that inspired no one. His 37 years in Congress made him the poster boy for term limits, he has 271 votes to increase taxes, he barely showed up on the trail, and he is to the left of the average voter in Massachusetts. In short, he was a worse candidate than even Martha Coakley.

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As it turns out, Republicans had the perfect candidate in Gabriel Gomez. New to politics, son of immigrants from Colombia, bilingual, Naval Academy grad, Navy pilot, Navy SEAL, successful businessman. He started out green, but was a remarkably quick study, and depending on your view, either won the debates against his veteran opponent, or at worst, held his own in the first two and won convincingly in the final debate.

Oh, and not only is Gabriel a Latino success story he’s exactly what many of the major donors in the Republican world claim they desperately want – a moderate on social issues. He supports gay marriage, he supports the Toomey-Manchin gun control bill, he supports the Gang of 8 immigration reform proposal, and he even calls himself a “green Republican.”

Only one problem, those moderate Republican major donors who love to complain did not show up to defend this candidate and try to win this election. The total spending from the Democrat side dwarfed the spending on the Republican side. There was one notable exception; some fellow from California named John Jordan did spend more than a million dollars on an independent expenditure campaign promoting and defending Gomez.

Meanwhile, the left was there in a big way, spending more than 4 million dollars in the final three weeks savaging Gomez, and that’s merely the part we know about. The real number was certainly much more than that.

But of course, Massachusetts is rough territory for Republican candidates, and the overall political environment is not currently as toxic for the Democrats as it was when Scott Brown won in the winter of 2010. There is simply very little opportunity for a Republican in Massachusetts when the bad guys are spending more than double what the good guys spend.

Here’s the obvious yet inconvenient truth of the matter – the Democrat Party’s allies, having lost a special election for Senate in Massachusetts in 2010, were so afraid of losing again that they went all in. In sharp contrast — the Republican Party’s allies, having lost the elections in 2012, were so afraid of losing again that they ran away and chose not to even compete.

It’s a new strategy; you can’t lose if you don’t play! The Republican hangover from the 2012 elections is not over. Fortunately for these so-called Republican allies, they can comfortably now assure their donors that they did not waste their money on this race. How comforting.

Make no mistake; this was not a loss for the social issue conservative crowd. While Gomez is a great candidate, a fiscal conservative, and a foreign policy expert who spent a good deal of time on the front lines in faraway places protecting his parents adopted country, he’s not a culture warrior for the right.

This is a failure for all those fat cat Republican donors and establishment oriented Super PACs who complain endlessly that the Republican Party is too conservative on social issues. This was their chance, and they took a pass. And by the way, those same groups ended up going all in for Todd Akin at the end of the 2012 campaign.

To be clear, both the NRSC under Chairman Jerry Moran (R-Kan.) and the RNC under Chairman Reince Priebus did help Gomez, and did try to win this race, so let there be no confusion about that.

The next time that you are forced to hear a diatribe from the yacht club crowd about how terrible it is that we don’t have more moderate candidates, ask them what they did for Gabriel Gomez in the Massachusetts special election. If they have nothing to say on that, then politely tell them to shut up, and advise them to keep their day jobs.

Curt Anderson is a Republican strategist and a partner at OnMessage Inc., a GOP media and polling firm that worked for the Gomez campaign. He co-wrote Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s book “Leadership in Crisis.”